Lets hope we get the boat turned around soon—I think I see an iceberg on the horizon.

One despairs of trying to break through to the mainstream at this point. What bothers me the most is the wingnuts who have actually visited Occupy sites and still lie about what’s going on.

There’s another very specific form of dehumanization of the OWS protesters that I’ve been exposed to—claiming that the OWS protesters are anti-Semitic, based on interviews with a few nutjobs who have apparently joined the protest because they believe the banks are run by the Elders of Zion.

“My dear Mademoiselle, perhaps you have already observed that in Casablanca, human life is cheap.”—Major Strasser

When there are 7 billion people on the planet and climbing, when government acts in unrepresentative ways and seems more and more a servant of the ruling class, when you can suffer home invasion and robbery (and murder) in “safe” neighborhoods miles from where the truly poor and desperate people live, it’s all too easy to lose any sense of community and start pursuing the main chance.  In economic terms, the opportunity cost of empathy is too high in a random and lawless world.

A republic, if we can keep it.  Indeed.

I wonder how anyone can remain rational on the average American diet.

dehumanizing the protesters is part of a larger process of dehumanizing all the victims of the economic recession.

Yep. It starts with “eh they’re all just too lazy to get jobs,” which is certainly hateful and dehumanizing but requires a lot of extra mental baggage in the form of pretending that there are totally enough jobs out there for everyone. Eventually it evolves into “eh just fuck em anyway,” which is easier because now you can just admit that there aren’t enough jobs, but you don’t actually give a shit, because you have one so why should you?

I honestly think a lot of conservatives are conservatives because it’s easier in some ways to hate those who suffer than it is to feel bad for them. Or perhaps they’re just too scared of the idea of a world where you can suffer without deserving it to admit that that’s the world we live in.

I all too easily can see how someone can convince herself that it’s nothing more than weeding a garden.

That’s how my parents see it. My stepdad would like to see the police just start shooting them, thereby purging society of these worthless hooligans.

Yeah, I’ve been saying for a while that the average conservative wants me personally to die in poverty of a preventable illness for the crime of being an American citizen who disagrees with them.

Sex is a subversive force, after all, that encourages intimacy and affection and distracts you from constantly establishing dominance and submission in every encounter you have.

You bring up a very interesting point, Amanda. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for some time. It’s something that’s always been in the back of my mind but now it’s in the forefront.

Conservatives, indeed a lot of people, are a lot more comfortable with violence than they are with sex. It first struck me when I was speaking with a co-worker who has a son who raps. She’s appalled by the violent images and words he uses. She says he’s quite graphic to the point of disturbing but then ended her complaint with “I guess I shouldn’t complain. At least he doesn’t talk about sex!” I was floored. Really?

And I was speaking with a woman who owned a store I frequent. She told me about her daughter watching a movie with violent scenes. She said while the film was appropriately rated she didn’t like the violence. And she ended her complaint with “Well, at least there wasn’t any sex or nudity so that’s a good thing.” Again, I had a similar reaction as with my co-worker. I asked “So movies where people get killed and blown up are okay?” She thought about it for a minute and said “Well… not OKAY…” Then I said “But movies with people having sex…?” She looked horrified. “Oh, my god. That’s horrible!” I didn’t say anything else.

Both incidents happened within a week of each other and since then I’ve been paying more attention to it and it seems to be the prevalent attitude among a lot of people. Now I’m not about showing a 9 year old how to use a Rabbit or teaching the art of the blow job to 7th graders but this attitude seems unhealthy and explains a lot about our culture.

Sex is usually about being coming together, having pleasure in each others company, and/or intimacy (I understand there are exceptions to that rule.) While violence is about…. as opposite to that as you can get (BDSM the obvious exception). How can the former be horrible and the latter not? I think because it can foster intimacy which can increase a sense of connection and empathy in people. (Under the right circumstances) and when people come together, it makes the “divide” in “divide and conquer” that much more difficult.

And I have to note that I’m not anti-violent entertainment. In fact, watching shit get blown up in a staple in my summer entertainment. But when you have a person lamenting a violence television show but thinks Janet Jackson showing her breast is 100X worse (true story!)- I think that’s indicative of a problem.

I think conservative haters are doubling down against OWS in part because, in it’s best moments, that movement is starting to roll back the Randization of America.  Dehumanizing works a lot better against straw hippies and abstract stereotypes, and OWS knows that well enough to focus on getting a huge variety of actual people out there, talking about the specific ways in which they’ve been dicked over for someone else’s economic benefit.

We saw it online with reactions to the ‘We Are the 99%’ tubmblr—that blog provoked a visceral reaction in anyone with a shred of empathy, and so we got conservatives rushing in to mock it and divert attention elsewhere. And in the actual encampments, a big part of the experience has been meeting people from different walks of life, who are all getting variously screwed over by the same system, and talking about it while helping each other out with the day-to-day logistics of living in a big open space. Building that kind of human connection isn’t enough to turn the whole ship around, but it is a necessary step in the process.

Genine, if I recall correctly Janet’s breast was actually exposed by Justin Timberlake on the lyric “I’m going to have you naked by the end of this song.”

So really, he’s the one who should have gotten in troubs for the boob.  But she did.

This post is fundamentally wrong.

There are better and worse ways of dealing with Occupy protesters in various cities, and there are First Amendment issues associated with this, but fundamentally, someone in power was going to seek to clear out the parks at some point in time.

“We are the 99 percent” is a great slogan that I in many ways agree with, but the protesters are not, literally, the 99 percent. They’re protesters, with the time and the wherewithal to sleep in tents in a public park for weeks or months. And the tug-of-war between protesters and law enforcement has been going on for generations and Occupy was not going to be exempt from it.

It’s important for people NOT to make the mistake Amanda makes and assume the interests of the protesters are identical to the interests for the people they represent. We have fundamental economic problems in this country that will not be solved by allowing people to continue a protest indefinitely; in contrast, even if protesters are driven out (as they were in New York and Oakland) does not mean their message will not be heard.

I’d prefer that law enforcement finds better things to do than go after Occupy protests which don’t seem to be harming anyone as far as I can tell. And law enforcement should be required to scrupulously adhere to the First Amendment in any actions they do take. But the “dehumanization of the American worker” has nothing except a symbolic, metaphorical relationship to the clearing of protesters from a park.

“They’re protesters, with the time and the wherewithal to sleep in tents in a public park for weeks or months. “

Oh you mean unemployed people of all ages, the homeless, retirees who’ve lost their pensions because of Wall Street, and kids getting out of college who will never be able to pay off their debt because there’s no jobs? That kind of wherewithal?

Because, yeah. They have it all right. More and more Americans do.

“We have fundamental economic problems in this country that will not be solved by allowing people to continue a protest indefinitely.”

Hey, we’ve tried every other avenue—protesting, voting, petitioning—to little avail. You got any better ideas, or are you just concern trolling from your comfy chair? People are suffering and dying and no one gave a shit until they started making themselves visible. Then it was pepper spray and jailings and beatings and a conversation that went from “poor rich people pay too many taxes!” to “Wow, I guess maybe there is some serious economic inequality in this country, huh?”

The whole mentality always reminds me of the joke about two people (often lawyers, but not always) camping in the woods. They hear a sound and realize there is a lion (puma, tiger, wolf) outside sniffing around.

One of them starts putting on their running shoes.

“Are you crazy?” says the other, “You can’t outrun that thing!”

“I don’t have to outrun that,” says their companion, “I just have to outrun you.”

I’ve been wondering, since the counterprotestor posted that thing where he said “I work 70-hour weeks and never get a vacation and I’m not complaining” and I thought “you should be”: if there are people below me on the economic ladder because they’re bad people, they’ve done something wrong, why are there people above me? How do those people explain why I’m where I am?

So really, he’s the one who should have gotten in troubs for the boob.  But she did.

No no, you’ve got it all wrong. The crime is in *having* the boobs in the first place. JT just helped society catch her in that vile and evil act of being female in public. He’s an American hero, really.

I’ve been wondering, since the counterprotestor posted that thing where he said “I work 70-hour weeks and never get a vacation and I’m not complaining” and I thought “you should be”

My reaction would’ve been, “Do you hate yourself?!”

It takes a tragically fucked-up perspective (be it forced upon someone by their lived reality or enticed of them by the martyristic bragging rights) to see that level of day-in, day-out grind as the best anybody has any business wanting.

Either that or he’s lucky enough to be doing a job he loves enough that he WANTS to work that much, in which case his argument is hella disingenuous and privileged.

Kyra, my actual reaction was “why the fuck not?” but the punctuation got too complicated.

Was at a party this weekend where a 20-something, self-identified liberal actually said that he thought the pepper spray cop was right to do what he did, because “if you break the law, that’s what you’re going to get.” I asked, “so if you break the law, you should get pepper sprayed, even if you’re not actually harming anyone?” He said, “yes.” I said, “and the cops should be able to inflict that, on the spot, based on their judgement call?” He said, “yes.” Several people at the table were nodding their heads with him.

As someone deeply involved in the Occupy movement, I lost a little bit of hope and gained a little bit of fear with that conversation. I can feel the transfusion going drip by drip lately.

Kyra, it’s worse than that, because the guy is a Marine.  That’s right.  He’s paid for with tax dollars.  The college tuition he crows about earning?  Other peoples tax money.  He’s a government employee and a recipient, albeit at the lowest level, of the corporate welfare intrinsic I. The military industrial complex.

Apparently, Newt Gingrich is a legitimate candidate for president, crook that he is.  His latest is that no single mothers should receive food stamps because they didn’t marry the fathers of their children.

Because being a mother that’s not owned by a man is the worst thing you can be.  You had SEX!  Without being some man’s chattel, and if you’re unemployed now, well you and the baby should starve since you’re just a slut and the baby’s a bastard.

What century do we live in again?

@14 here in Socal, we nearly had another long, painful grocery worker strike, which was narrowly avoided by negotiation.  One of the concessions that the grocery workers won was health care that required very small contributions from the employees.  I talked to friends and coworkers who seemed annoyed that the grocery workers paid so little for their insurance while my friends had to pay so much more.

It was as though my acquaintances thought that it was more important for the grocery workers to make the public happy, not to negotiate working conditions and compensation that were best for the workers and their families.  And quite ironically, rather than make people angry at organized workers, it should be a great example of why people like my acquaintances should be in unions.

We had a woman show up to one of our occupations regionally to yell at them about damaging the grass in front of city hall, on the day she was forced to sell back her business to the bank at a huge financial loss to her. Same thing - blame the people who speak up about the problem instead of blaming the people causing the problem. We as a culture are addicted to denial.

@18
I lost a little bit of hope and gained a little bit of fear with that conversation.

This is an everyday occurrence for me. Of course, I live in the Southeast, but still, I can’t help but wonder if there are enough Americans who give enough of a shit to stop drinking the corporatist Kool-Aid.

I agree with most of this post but not

Sex is a subversive force, after all, that encourages intimacy and affection and distracts you from constantly establishing dominance and submission in every encounter you have.

Huh?  Not consistent with my (het, female) experience at all.  Sex does encourage intimacy and affection but the price is a fuckton of dominance and submission.  It isn’t worse than the rest of the capitalist USA—the labor market imposes dominance and submission on people even more.  But too often, and for too many people, erotic = hierarchical.

Friendship, not sex, gives us an alternative to dominance and submission.

(For what it’s worth, I’m still involved with a man.  I think he and I have worked out a relatively egalitarian deal.)

This whole argument revolves around cognitive disassociation.  More so it even hinges on disliking other people.  So it combines what Jan Hooks’ calls “White Supremacy Patriarchal Capitalism” with a healthy dose of pessimistic cynicism and comes out with the idea that the status quo shouldn’t be upset because “I” have something enough not worth losing for even though it’s a tiny percentage of what it should be and deserves to be. 

I think it’s human nature to some extent to worry about yourself and then your immediate surroundings but in order to drive the argument the southern strategy of blaming minorities has reached a sort of critical mass where hating everybody is the only answer.  You simply can’t like anybody you don’t directly like, the underlying racism is apparent but it carries over into white and middle class ranks.  They’ve fundamentally rewritten the societal argument that you’re only as good as your weakest link to a tiered society of chaff that get in the way of the wheat.

You don’t have sex with your friends Unree? That’s kind of sad…

#12:

Most of the 99 percent have jobs and homes and family responsibilities and can’t protest. Or they are lookking for jobs. Even in an economic recession, the “average” person is not going to be able to camp out in a park for a month. The people who can are praiseworthy, but they are not really the 99 percent.

And that’s why it’s important to remember that their interests, as protesters (to stay in parks as long as possible) are not equivalent to the goals of the movement (to address the fundamental inequities in society). The purpose of the protest is not to establish a right to camp in parks, but to call attention to economic injustice. And that goal is essentially only tangentially related to the issue of breaking up the camps. Occupy can, and will, continue to call attention to injustice whether or not the camps are broken up, and the breaking up of the camps is bad for people who want to continue the protest but is neither here nor there when it comes to addressing economic inequity.

@21 Dymphna I agree with your point on denial, it is rare that anyone gets thanked for pointing out someone else’s comforting delusions.

How successful, and for how long can media keep up this narrative without isolating large portions of their viewers. Fox can easily demonise Muslims, their viewers know nothing about Muslims, but it is much harder to dehumanise protesting Americans. To ignore the pictures and videos of brutality you have to increasingly isolated oneself.

The brutality also relies on the police, what is their breaking point? Hanging out with peaceful protesters day after day must have some affect, one that no amount of media spin can remove.

Dilan Esper at 9:05:

I’d prefer that law enforcement finds better things to do than go after Occupy protests which don’t seem to be harming anyone as far as I can tell. And law enforcement should be required to scrupulously adhere to the First Amendment in any actions they do take. But the “dehumanization of the American worker” has nothing except a symbolic, metaphorical relationship to the clearing of protesters from a park.

I don’t see how Amanda is fundamentally wrong when her conclusion and yours are pretty much identical.

She says:

I want to agree with what (Digby) says here and add another thought: dehumanizing the protesters is part of a larger process of dehumanizing all the victims of the economic recession.

It seems pretty clear to me that the person who looks at the Occupy movement and says “let them eat pepper spray” is very likely going to be the same person who looks at someone with a shitty job and say “Fuck them and I have some ill-informed judgements to make on their lifestyle.”

And it seems further to me that the way we allow corporations to treat their workers shabbily in this country informs this intellectually and feeds it practically. Being dehumanized by your bosses does not make most of us into better people. It makes most of us shittier and meaner to everyone and takes away some of our empathy. I tend to think this isn’t something that was engineered by the Sam Waltons of the world on purpose (because I think people are pretty terrible at social engineering not because I’d put it past them) but a side effect of them just making a buck.

What the protesters in the parks and the rest of the people they’re claiming to speak for is an interest in not being treated shittily, whether its by having to accept crappy conditions on the job or being pushed around by cops.

Unree, 23:

But too often, and for too many people, erotic = hierarchical.

Yabbut unless you negotiate it as equals first, that’s bad. Capitalism is sopposed to be about hierarchy, sex is not.

Dilan, 26:

it’s important to remember that their interests, as protesters (to stay in parks as long as possible) are not equivalent to the goals of the movement (to address the fundamental inequities in society).

Not equialent, perhaps, but related. All else being equal, a protest is less effective the more the people being protested against believe they just need to wait it out. In an extreme example, someone a few posts back said they should just go home at night. How effective would protesting be if people knew they just had to wait for sundown and it would all be over regardless?

That’s why it’s important to be willing to resist police attempts to break it up, also.

Most of the 99 percent have jobs and homes and family responsibilities and can’t protest. Or they are lookking for jobs. Even in an economic recession, the “average” person is not going to be able to camp out in a park for a month. The people who can are praiseworthy, but they are not really the 99 percent.
Comment #26: Dilan Esper on 11/29 at 05:14 AM

The people who got arrested in Civil Rights marches weren’t the average minority person.  That doesn’t mean they didn’t represent them.

In any protest there are those who protest, and then there are the people who are willing to go the extra mile and get arrested and/or assaulted based on whatever premise the establishment can cook up to try to stop them.  Any well-run protest has very specific plans for the second group and makes sure everyone in that group knows what to expect.  Any well-run protest makes it clear that just showing up is plenty, that you do not need to be arrested, hosed, pepper-sprayed, or otherwise assaulted to be helpful.

Rosa Parks didn’t just happen to be on the bus one day and decide she was tired of the bullshit.  She was ready and had a support system waiting.  Others were considered and rejected because their backgrounds were not “squeaky clean.”  There are some assholes who think this is wrong and made her protest “fake” somehow.  It’s not.  Her planned protest was a legitimate response to real injustice.

How you got the idea that the OWS people are protesting for the right to live in parks is a mystery to me.  It is a side issue, convenient to the establishment to distract from what the OWS people are really protesting.  They end up fighting for their right to protest in a meaningful and visible manner and that’s often what ends up on the news, not the actual protest.  It gets portrayed as the right to live and poop on someone else’s property.

I’m reminded of the saying about the moon and the dog and the pointing finger.

Rosa Parks didn’t just happen to be on the bus one day and decide she was tired of the bullshit.

Not according to the story they tell you in second grade. Granted, it’s a bit harder to spin how several hundred people happened to be camping in a park and decided not to leave.

I honestly think a lot of conservatives are conservatives because it’s easier in some ways to hate those who suffer than it is to feel bad for them.

That’s really what it comes down to. It’s easier to ignore and despise people than empathize with them. It’s easier to resent the people who point out injustice instead of those perpetrating it. It’s easier to deny and forget and pretend everything is just fine. Otherwise you might have to 1) spend some time feeling truly unhappy, frustrated, and powerless and 2) actually do something to solve the problem instead of pretending it’ll solve itself.

divide and conquer, yes?

Must agree with the sentiment of conservative = easy. 

That’s really the cornerstone of the whole thing. There is no ‘struggle’ - there is no injustice in the world. There’s nothing you have to do except of course submit to corrupt power.

Dilan Esper @ 11 “the protesters are not, literally, the 99 percent. They’re protesters, with the time and the wherewithal to sleep in tents in a public park for weeks or months.”

I don’t know about other places, but here in Detroit at least some of the protesters camping in the park also got up every morning and went to their factory jobs.  Others didn’t have jobs—having been laid off from factory jobs that didn’t come back after the ‘bail out’ of GM and Chrysler.

Just sayin’

It seems pretty clear to me that the person who looks at the Occupy movement and says “let them eat pepper spray” is very likely going to be the same person who looks at someone with a shitty job and say “Fuck them and I have some ill-informed judgements to make on their lifestyle.”

If there’s one thing that will always keep me in the Democratic party, it’s the fact that I know that when the Republicans are done demonizing African Americans, the unemployed, and Latinos, they’re going to come for me, next. And I think lots of people who are Democrats and not a member of any kind of minority group in the current sights of the Republican hate machine realize that. The same way scientists realize that the Republicans might be railing against climate scientists now but are going to come for the biologists and physicists later.

And more to the point, anyone who DOESN’T realize that is going to be in for a rude awakening.

Much though I prefer sex to violence (and that’s a whole lot!!!!), I have to admit that the sex that commonly makes it into movies tends to be one step away from violence anyway.  It’s rarely a healthy sexual relationship, and even more rarely does any woman involved do so in a non-coerced, non-creepy way.  More often than not, she’s drunk, drugged, bought, rented or is simply there for some sort of plot to further the action of the male characters. 

It’s too bad, but in truth, given the way Hollywood is working right now, the less sex they put in movies, probably the better it is for all of us.

It’s religious interventionism. Or as some people might refer it to, neo-calvinism.

It’s the idea that if a deity could and does interfere in our world, then things end out generally speaking as they’re supposed to. So the poor and starving are that way for a reason, and who are we to interfere with God’s will?

That’s the concept that the Tea Party is based around. It’s just gone secular, kinda sorta (but not really) over the last year or so. But at it’s heart, it’s religious fundamentalism.

What’s the ideological problem with having protesters do protesting to represent the rest of us who can’t or won’t protest? Technically, their efforts to occupy and promulgate the message confer benefits to me without me having to miss work or freeze my ass off in the park. Hooray for them, and thank you.

Whenever a protest makes the news (not just OWS, but throughout the past decade or so), someone always makes a point like, “Well, most of the people at the march/rally/occupation were professional protesters who do this all the time.” Like that sullies the protest somehow. It’s not as if all problems in the world are solved, and protestors are just stirring up meaningless shit out of boredom. I honestly admire those who can keep the fires burning week after week, year after year. I think that’s the opposite of what some people “want” protestors to be: political virgins, good ole normal folks who have never been involved in a movement before, but gosh darn it, something tipped the scales and they’ve had it. I think the Tea Party nailed this image and somehow manages to sustain it after several years.

Whenever a protest makes the news (not just OWS, but throughout the past decade or so), someone always makes a point like, “Well, most of the people at the march/rally/occupation were professional protesters who do this all the time.”

It’s sort of like how all wars are illegitimate because the people fighting in them are professional soldiers. And no one ever expresses gratitude to soldiers for fighting on their behalf.

Whenever I quote this line out of context, to people unfamiliar with the source material, I always feel like people aren’t getting the full effect of the original words. I assure you this was said with anger and bitterness and viciously pointed sarcasm. But even out of context it’s just so frighteningly applicable that I say it on a near-daily basis:

“This is America, land of can-do, of grab all you can and fuck the other guy.” ~ Spider Jerusalem, Transmetropolitan

It’s no wonder Warren Ellis drinks heavily. He obviously understands human nature waaaaaaaay too well to cope otherwise.

#39 ZING! Nice one. Got to remember that one.